Toronto can say bye to Eye, it’s changing to The Grid

Eye Weekly as Torontonians know it will be gone in a blink. As of May 12, the weekly lifestyle and entertainment guide will be launching in a new direction with a new name: The Grid. Laas Turnbull, publisher and editor-in-chief, announced the name change via Twitter early this afternoon (“On May 12, Eye Weekly becomes […]

Alicia Androich
April 11, 2011

Eye Weekly as Torontonians know it will be gone in a blink. As of May 12, the weekly lifestyle and entertainment guide will be launching in a new direction with a new name: The Grid.

Laas Turnbull, publisher and editor-in-chief, announced the name change via Twitter early this afternoon (“On May 12, Eye Weekly becomes THE GRID. Pass it on…”) and spoke with Marketing about the new name and some of the other planned changes.

The new handle is not some sort of Tron reference, he said. “It’s actually more descriptive than anything. If you look at a map of the city and take out the background and just emphasize all the roadways—North, South, East and West—it looks like a piece of graph paper. So that notion of looking at the city from a street level and a neighbourhood level is very much the direction we’re going editorially,” said Turnbull, who stepped into his role at the Torstar-owned Eye seven months ago.

The name change is part of a move in a radically different direction for the publication, he continued.

Rather than remain an alternative newsweekly heavy in arts, entertainment and listings, The Grid will essentially be a city magazine for people in their 20s and 30s. “So a younger, hipper, more provocative version of Toronto Life in a weekly guise,” he said.

“We’re pretty excited about it because there’s never been a weekly city magazine for young people in Toronto and we think there’s a real appetite for it,” said Turnbull. He added that Torstar has put a lot of resources into the launch.

“There really hasn’t been a big print and online media brand launch in this town for a long, long time. Dose was probably the last thing that would even approach this scale.”